CALL TO THE MINISTRY.
The Pilgrim falls into the hands of Giant Despair because he has
himself first strayed into Byepath Meadow. Bunyan found an explanation
of his last convulsion in an act of unbelief, of which, on looking
back, he perceived that he had been guilty. He had been delivered out
of his first temptation. He had not been sufficiently on his guard
against temptations that might come in the future. Nay, he had himself
tempted God. His wife had been overtaken by a premature confinement,
and was suffering acutely. It was at the time when Bunyan was
exercised with questions about the truth of religion altogether. As
the poor woman lay crying at his side, he had said mentally, 'Lord, if
Thou wilt now remove this sad affliction from my wife, and cause that
she be troubled no more therewith this night, then I shall know that
Thou canst discern the more secret thoughts of the heart.' In a moment
the pain ceased and she fell into a sleep which lasted till morning.
Bunyan, though surprised at the time, forgot what had happened, till
it rushed back upon his memory, when he had committed himself by a
similar mental assent to selling Christ. He remembered the proof which
had been given to him that God could and did discern his thoughts. God
had discerned this second thought also, and in punishing him for it
had punished him at the same time for the doubt which he had allowed
himself to feel. 'I should have believed His word,' he said, 'and not
have put an "if" upon the all-seeingness of God.'
The suffering was over now, and he felt that it had been infinitely
beneficial to him. He understood better the glory of God and of his
Son. The Scriptures had opened their secrets to him, and he had seen
them to be in very truth the keys of the kingdom of Heaven. Never so
clearly as after this 'temptation' had he perceived 'the heights of
grace, and love, and mercy.' Two or three times 'he had such strange
apprehensions of the grace of God as had amazed him.' The impression
was so overpowering that if it had continued long 'it would have
rendered him incapable for business.' He joined his friend Mr.
Gifford's church. He was baptised in the Ouse, and became a professed
member of the Baptist congregation. Soon after, his mental conflict
was entirely over, and he had two quiet years of peace. Before a man
can use his powers to any purpose, he must arrive at some conviction
in which his intellect can acquiesce. 'Calm yourself,' says Jean Paul;
'it is your first necessity. Be a stoic if nothing else will serve.'
Bunyan had not been driven into stoicism. He was now restored to the
possession of his faculties, and his remarkable ability was not long
in showing itself.
The first consequence of his mental troubles was an illness. He had a
cough which threatened to turn into consumption. He thought it was all
over with him, and he was fixing his eyes 'on the heavenly Jerusalem
and the innumerable company of angels;' but the danger passed off, and
he became well and strong in mind and body. Notwithstanding his
various miseries, he had not neglected his business, and had indeed
been specially successful. By the time that he was twenty-five years
old he was in a position considerably superior to that in which he was
born. 'God,' says a contemporary biographer, 'had increased his stores
so that he lived in great credit among his neighbours.' On May 13,
1653, Bedfordshire sent an address to Cromwell approving the dismissal
of the Long Parliament, recognising Oliver himself as the Lord's
instrument, and recommending the county magistrates as fit persons to
serve in the Assembly which was to take its place. Among thirty-six
names attached to this document, appear those of Gifford and Bunyan.
This speaks for itself: he must have been at least a householder and a
person of consideration. It was not, however, as a prosperous brazier
that Bunyan was to make his way. He had a gift of speech, which, in
the democratic congregation to which he belonged, could not long
remain hid. Young as he was, he had sounded the depths of spiritual
experience. Like Dante he had been in hell--the popular hell of
English Puritanism--and in 1655 he was called upon to take part in the
'ministry.' He was modest, humble, shrinking. The minister when he
preached was, according to the theory, an instrument uttering the
words not of himself but of the Holy Spirit. A man like Bunyan, who
really believed this, might well be alarmed. After earnest entreaty,
however, 'he made experiment of his powers' in private, and it was at
once evident that, with the thing which these people meant by
inspiration, he was abundantly supplied. No such preacher to the
uneducated English masses was to be found within the four seas. He
says that he had no desire of vain glory; no one who has studied his
character can suppose that he had. He was a man of natural genius,
who believed the Protestant form of Christianity to be completely
true. He knew nothing of philosophy, nothing of history, nothing of
literature. The doubts to which he acknowledged being without their
natural food, had never presented themselves in a form which would
have compelled him to submit to remain uncertain. Doubt, as he had
felt it, was a direct enemy of morality and purity, and as such he had
fought with it and conquered it. Protestant Christianity was true. All
mankind were perishing unless they saw it to be true. This was his
message; a message--supposing him to have been right--of an importance
so immeasurable that all else was nothing. He was still 'afflicted
with the fiery darts of the devil,' but he saw that he must not bury
his abilities. 'In fear and trembling,' therefore, he set himself to
the work, and 'did according to his power preach the Gospel that God
had shewn him.'
'The Lord led him to begin where his Word began--with sinners. This
part of my work,' he says, 'I fulfilled with a great sense, for the
terrors of the law and guilt for my transgressions lay heavy on my
conscience. I preached what I felt. I had been sent to my hearers as
from the dead. I went myself in chains to preach to them in chains,
and carried that fire in my own conscience that I persuaded them to
beware of. I have gone full of guilt and terror to the pulpit door;
God carried me on with a strong hand, for neither guilt nor hell could
take me off.'
Many of Bunyan's addresses remain in the form of theological
treatises, and that I may not have to return to the subject, I shall
give some account of them. His doctrine was the doctrine of the best
and strongest minds in Europe. It had been believed by Luther, it had
been believed by Knox. It was believed at that moment by Oliver
Cromwell as completely as by Bunyan himself. It was believed, so far
as such a person could be said to believe anything, by the all
accomplished Leibnitz himself. Few educated people use the language of
it now. In them it was a fire from heaven shining like a sun in a dark
world. With us the fire has gone out; in the place of it we have but
smoke and ashes, and the Evangelical mind in search of 'something
deeper and truer than satisfied the last century,' is turning back to
Catholic verities. What Bunyan had to say may be less than the whole
truth: we shall scarcely find the still missing part of it in lines of
thought which we have outgrown.
Bunyan preached wherever opportunity served--in woods, in barns, on
village greens, or in town chapels. The substance of his sermons he
revised and published. He began, as he said, with sinners, explaining
the condition of men in the world. They were under the law, or they
were under grace. Every person that came into the world was born under
the law, and as such was bound, under pain of eternal damnation, to
fulfil completely and continually every one of the Ten Commandments.
The Bible said plainly, 'Cursed is every one that continueth not in
all things which are written in the book of the law to do them.' 'The
soul that sinneth it shall die.' The Ten Commandments extended into
many more, and to fail in a single one was as fatal as to break them
all. A man might go on for a long time, for sixty years perhaps,
without falling. Bunyan does not mean that anyone really could do all
this, but he assumes the possibility; yet he says if the man slipped
once before he died, he would eternally perish. The law does not refer
to words and actions only, but to thoughts and feelings. It followed
a man in his prayers, and detected a wandering thought. It allowed no
repentance to those who lived and died under it. If it was asked
whether God could not pardon, as earthly judges pardon criminals, the
answer was, that it is not the law which is merciful to the earthly
offender but the magistrate. The law is an eternal principle. The
magistrate may forgive a man without exacting satisfaction. The law
knows no forgiveness. It can be as little changed as an axiom of
mathematics. Repentance cannot undo the past. Let a man leave his sins
and live as purely as an angel all the rest of his life, his old
faults remain in the account against him, and his state is as bad as
ever it was. God's justice once offended knows not pity or compassion,
but runs on the offender like a lion and throws him into prison, there
to lie to all eternity unless infinite satisfaction be given to it.
And that satisfaction no son of Adam could possibly make.
This conception of Divine justice, not as a sentence of a judge, but
as the action of an eternal law, is identical with Spinoza's. That
every act involves consequences which cannot be separated from it, and
may continue operative to eternity, is a philosophical position which
is now generally admitted. Combined with the traditionary notions of a
future judgment and punishment in hell, the recognition that there was
a law in the case and that the law could not be broken, led to the
frightful inference that each individual was liable to be kept alive
and tortured through all eternity. And this, in fact, was the fate
really in store for every human creature unless some extraordinary
remedy could be found. Bunyan would allow no merit to anyone. He would
not have it supposed that only the profane or grossly wicked were in
danger from the law. 'A man,' he says, 'may be turned from a vain,
loose, open, profane conversation and sinning against the law, to a
holy, righteous, religious life, and yet be under the same state and
as sure to be damned as the others that are more profane and loose.'
The natural man might think it strange, but the language of the curse
was not to be mistaken. Cursed is every one who has failed to fulfil
the whole law. There was not a person in the whole world who had not
himself sinned in early life. All had sinned in Adam also, and St.
Paul had said in consequence, 'There is none that doeth good, no, not
one! The law was given not that we might be saved by obeying it, but
that we might know the holiness of God and our own vileness, and that
we might understand that we should not be damned for nothing. God
would have no quarrelling at His just condemning of us at that day.'
This is Bunyan's notion of the position in which we all naturally
stand in this world, and from which the substitution of Christ's
perfect fulfilment of the law alone rescues us. It is calculated, no
doubt, to impress on us a profound horror of moral evil when the
penalty attached to it is so fearful. But it is dangerous to introduce
into religion metaphysical conceptions of 'law.' The cord cracks that
is strained too tightly; and it is only for brief periods of high
spiritual tension that a theology so merciless can sustain itself. No
one with a conscience in him will think of claiming any merit for
himself. But we know also that there are degrees of demerit, and,
theory or no theory, we fall back on the first verse of the English
Liturgy, as containing a more endurable account of things.
For this reason, among others, Bunyan disliked the Liturgy. He thought
the doctrine of it false, and he objected to a Liturgy on principle.
He has a sermon on Prayer, in which he insists that to be worth
anything prayer must be the expression of an inward feeling; and that
people cannot feel in lines laid down for them. Forms of prayer he
thought especially mischievous to children, as accustoming them to use
words to which they attached no meaning.
'My judgment,' he says, 'is that men go the wrong way to learn their
children to pray. It seems to me a better way for people to tell their
children betimes what cursed creatures they are, how they are under
the wrath of God by reason of original and actual sin; also to tell
them the nature of God's wrath and the duration of misery, which if
they would conscientiously do, they would sooner learn their children
to pray than they do. The way that men learn to pray is by conviction
of sin, and this is the way to make our "sweet babes" do so too.'
'Sweet babes' is unworthy of Bunyan. There is little sweetness in a
state of things so stern as he conceives. He might have considered,
too, that there was a danger of making children unreal in another and
worse sense by teaching them doctrines which neither child nor man can
comprehend. It may be true that a single sin may consign me to
everlasting hell, but I cannot be made to acknowledge the justice of
it. 'Wrath of God' and such expressions are out of place when we are
brought into the presence of metaphysical laws. Wrath corresponds to
free-will misused. It is senseless and extravagant when pronounced
against actions which men cannot help, when the faulty action is the
necessary consequence of their nature, and the penalty the necessary
consequence of the action.
The same confusion of thought lies in the treatment of the kindred
subjects of Free-will, Election, and Reprobation. The logic must be
maintained, and God's moral attributes simultaneously vindicated.
Bunyan argues about it as ingeniously as Leibnitz himself. Those who
suppose that specific guilt attaches to particular acts, that all men
are put into the world, free to keep the Commandments or to break
them, that they are equally able to do one as to do the other, and
are, therefore, proper objects of punishment, hold an opinion which is
consistent in itself, but is in entire contradiction with facts.
Children are not as able to control their inclinations as grown men,
and one man is not as able to control himself as another. Some have no
difficulty from the first, and are constitutionally good; some are
constitutionally weak, or have incurable propensities for evil. Some
are brought up with care and insight; others seem never to have any
chance at all. So evident is this, that impartial thinkers have
questioned the reality of human guilt in the sense in which it is
generally understood. Even Butler allows that if we look too curiously
we may have a difficulty in finding where it lies. And here, if
anywhere, there is a real natural truth in the doctrine of Election,
independent of the merit of those who are so happy as to find favour.
Bunyan, however, reverses the inference. He will have all guilty
together, those who do well and those who do ill. Even the elect are
in themselves as badly off as the reprobate, and are equally included
under sin. Those who are saved are saved for Christ's merits and not
for their own.
Men of calmer temperament accept facts as they find them. They are too
conscious of their ignorance to insist on explaining problems which
are beyond their teach. Bunyan lived in an age of intense religious
excitement, when the strongest minds were exercising themselves on
those questions. It is noticeable that the most effective intellects
inclined to necessitarian conclusions: some in the shape of Calvinism,
some in the corresponding philosophic form of Spinozism. From both
alike there came an absolute submission to the decrees of God, and a
passionate devotion to his service; while the morality of Free-will is
cold and calculating. Appeals to a sense of duty do not reach beyond
the understanding. The enthusiasm which will stir men's hearts and
give them a real power of resisting temptation must be nourished on
more invigorating food.
But I need dwell no more on a subject which is unsuited for these
pages.
The object of Bunyan, like that of Luther, like that of all great
spiritual teachers, was to bring his wandering fellow-mortals into
obedience to the commandments, even while he insisted on the
worthlessness of it. He sounded the strings to others which had
sounded loudest in himself. When he passed from mysticism into matters
of ordinary life, he showed the same practical good sense which
distinguishes the chief of all this order of thinkers--St. Paul. There
is a sermon of Bunyan's on Christian behaviour, on the duties of
parents to children, and masters to servants, which might be studied
with as much advantage in English households as the 'Pilgrim's
Progress' itself. To fathers he says, 'Take heed that the misdeeds for
which thou correctest thy children be not learned them by thee. Many
children learn that wickedness of their parents, for which they beat
and chastise them. Take heed that thou smile not upon them to
encourage them in small faults, lest that thy carriage to them be an
encouragement to them to commit greater faults. Take heed that thou
use not unsavoury and unseemly words in thy chastising of them, as
railing, miscalling, and the like--this is devilish. Take heed that
thou do not use them to many chiding words and threatenings, mixed
with lightness and laughter. This will harden.'
And again: 'I tell you that if parents carry it lovingly towards their
children, mixing their mercies with loving rebukes, and their loving
rebukes with fatherly and motherly compassions, they are more likely
to save their children than by being churlish and severe to them. Even
if these things do not save them, if their mercy do them no good, yet
it will greatly ease them at the day of death to consider, I have done
by love as much as I could to save and deliver my child from hell.'
Whole volumes on education have said less, or less to the purpose,
than these simple words. Unfortunately, parents do not read Bunyan. He
is left to children.
Similarly, he says to masters:--
'It is thy duty so to behave thyself to thy servant that thy service
may not only be for thy good, but for the good of thy servant, and
that in body and soul. Deal with him as to admonition as with thy
children. Take heed thou do not turn thy servants into slaves by
overcharging them in thy work with thy greediness. Take heed thou
carry not thyself to thy servant as he of whom it is said, "He is such
a man of Belial that his servants cannot speak to him." The Apostle
bids you forbear to threaten them, because you also have a Master in
Heaven. Masters, give your servants that which is just, just labour
and just wages. Servants that are truly godly care not how cheap they
serve their masters, provided they may get into godly families, or
where they may be convenient for the Word. But if a master or
mistress takes this opportunity to make a prey of their servants, it
is abominable. I have heard poor servants say that in some carnal
families they have had more liberty to God's things and more fairness
of dealing than among many professors. Such masters make religion to
stink before the inhabitants of the land.'
Bunyan was generally charitable in his judgment upon others. If there
was any exception, it was of Professors who discredited their calling
by conceit and worldliness.
'No sin,' he says, 'reigneth more in the world than pride among
Professors. The thing is too apparent for any man to deny. We may and
do see pride display itself in the apparel and carriage of Professors
almost as much as among any in the land. I have seen church members so
decked and bedaubed with their fangles and toys that when they have
been at worship I have wondered with what faces such painted persons
could sit in the place where they were without swooning. I once talked
with a maid, by way of reproof for her fond and gaudy garment; she
told me the tailor would make it so. Poor proud girl, she gave orders
to the tailor to make it so.'
I will give one more extract from Bunyan's pastoral addresses. It
belongs to a later period in his ministry, when the law had, for a
time, remade Dissent into a crime; but it will throw light on the part
of his story which we are now approaching, and it is in every way very
characteristic of him. He is speaking to sufferers under persecution.
He says to them:--
'Take heed of being offended with magistrates, because by their
statutes they may cross thy inclinations. It is given to them to bear
the sword, and a command is to thee, if thy heart cannot acquiesce
with all things, with meekness and patience to suffer. Discontent in
the mind sometimes puts discontent into the mouth; and discontent in
the mouth doth sometimes also put a halter about thy neck. For as a
man speaking a word in jest may for that be hanged in earnest, so he
that speaks in discontent may die for it in sober sadness. Above all,
get thy conscience possessed more and more with this, that the
magistrate is God's ordinance, and is ordered of God as such; that he
is the minister of God to thee for good, and that it is thy duty to
fear him and to pray for him; to give thanks to God for him and be
subject to him; as both Paul and Peter admonish us; and that not only
for wrath, but for conscience sake. For all other arguments come short
of binding the soul when this argument is wanting, until we believe
that of God we are bound thereto.
'I speak not these things as knowing any that are disaffected to the
government, for I love to be alone, if not with godly men, in things
that are convenient. I speak to show my loyalty to the king, and my
love to my fellow-subjects, and my desire that all Christians shall
walk in ways of peace and truth.'